Instagram creator Mandy Liddle didn’t expect to go viral when she posted a video bemoaning Christmas string lights made with modern, energy-efficient LED bulbs. She captioned the video, which has been viewed nearly 3 million times, “Bring back incandescents 😤.”
But the quippy caption doesn’t capture the nuances of Liddle’s dream aesthetic. And it inadvertently put her in the center of a decades-old culture war battle.
Like Liddle, many creators on Instagram and TikTok have expressed nostalgia for the supposedly cozy vibes of incandescent holiday string lights, racking up tens of millions of views along the way. Many users describe LED lights as too blue, clinical, and cold. Other posts veer into dubious wellness content, pushing unfounded and false claims about how LED light might be affecting human health.
In fact, LED lights are significantly more efficient — 75%-90% — than incandescents, which makes them better for the climate. And because they emit less waste heat, they’re also less likely to cause fires than the old-fashioned bulbs.
And offline, some influencers’ attitudes toward LEDs are sometimes more complex than they appear in their videos.
“’I’m pretty climate conscious, I’m vegan, and I’ve always cared about the environment,” Liddle said in a phone interview.
Liddle said she likes that LED lights are more efficient and less polluting. Still, she complains, a lot of LED holiday lights are ugly.
A new battle in an old war
For most of the last two decades, attacking energy-efficient lights has been a pet project of climate deniers. And as climate denial narratives ricochet around social media, the incandescent cause is gaining popularity with creators who may not even realize the larger culture war they’re stepping into.
Read more: Eight of the top 10 online shows are spreading climate misinformation
Audrey Pearson, an electrical engineer who is not on TikTok and only rarely uses Instagram, was not aware of the online trend in favor of incandescent string lights. So she was surprised when a video — created with her writer wife — featuring her explanation of LED and incandescent lights racked up a million views.
“I had a little bit of anxiety when I saw views climbing so fast,” she said.
After providing a detailed explanation of why incandescents and LED lights look different, the video ends with a joke that Pearson now regrets. In the video, her wife asks, “What’s the solution?” and Pearson says, “The solution is to use incandescents — and screw the power bill.”
In retrospect, she said, she wishes she had ended on a shout-out to options for LED holiday lights that mimic that old-school aesthetic and save energy, like Tru-Tone’s strings or Merry Co’s Vinaglo lights.
“From a climate perspective, from an energy use perspective, from a safety perspective, basically everything that matters except a cozy holiday aesthetic, LEDs are superior,” she said. “But I can kind of see from a cultural perspective, when things are not doing so well in the economy and we’re struggling, we have this emphasis on nostalgia. I guess it feels comforting to go back to memories when things felt better and had that warm glow to them.”
A fight reignited
Ever since former President George W. Bush signed a 2007 law intended to phase out inefficient bulbs, vocal critics have sung incandescent praises. DeSmog, a media organization focused on combating climate misinformation, reported in 2011 that David Asman, the then host of Fox and Friends, said on air, “I hate fluorescent bulbs. They make me feel sick. They give me a headache.”
Fast Company reported that in 2019, President Donald Trump said that LED bulbs don’t “make you look as good,” and “as a vain person, that’s very important to me.”
More recently, anti-LED narratives have gotten an infusion of extreme claims from people in biohacking and wellness spaces. This trend also isn’t just coming from the right; like many online wellness trends, it is also spread by creators who identify as “crunchy” or “hippie.”
When talking about their dream holiday aesthetic, Liddle and Pearson kept coming back to the word “cozy.” Both said they like the warm, nostalgic glow that reminds them, at least in Liddle’s case, of Christmas at her grandmother’s.
But that nostalgia can take a darker turn when the context of the life-saving and life-improving science of the present is left out of the story. Nostalgia from homesteading and wellness influencers can veer into territory that denies life-saving scientific improvements like vaccines and pasteurization. On the light bulb front, influencers in the wellness space talk about the past as a warmly lit time in which people were “healthier.”
Dubious LED health claims
The effects of different types of bulbs on the human body are still an active area of study, and many claims spread online are not based on settled scientific fact. Perhaps the most researched way that LED lights interact with human health is that circadian rhythms — the systems that keep the body operating on a 24-hour sleep-wake cycle — are affected by light. In general, research shows that exposure to blue light decreases the production of melatonin, which can signal the body to fall asleep, and LED lights produce more blue light than incandescent light bulbs, though incandescent light also has blue light in it.
(Internet science literacy note: When trying to understand emerging science, we look for review articles that have analyzed many studies to see if there is a consensus. It’s very rare for one study to paint a full picture. For example, with climate change, we can point to studies and scientific organizations that have reviewed the literature and found that over 97% of research papers share the consensus view that climate change is real and caused by humans.)
Results from studies that look at how LED lights might influence our sleep are far from conclusive, according to a scientific review by the European Union. And the impacts are affected by variables like how much time a person spends looking at a light and how close the light source is to their eyes. Meanwhile, influencers pushing a return to incandescents often disregard the real safety improvements that energy-efficient lights provide.
“I don’t know if you have experience with the incandescent big style Christmas lights, but they’re scaldingly hot; you can easily burn yourself,” Tru-Tone founder David Andora said. “Your mom was always like, ‘If you leave the room, turn the tree off,’ because all of the horror stories of people’s houses burning down.”
Energy-efficient and renewable energy technologies also have major health benefits in that they curb climate-warming pollution, thus reducing people’s exposure to air pollution and to the health risks associated with heat waves and other extreme weather.
Concussions, then curiosity
One proponent of a return to incandescent lights is Tristan Scott, the head of operations and marketing at Daylight Computer Co., a company that sells grayscale tablets that have a Kindle-like look to their screen and an optional amber-colored backlight. Scott became interested in the intersection of light and health after suffering a series of concussions in 2017. He now broadcasts his thoughts on Instagram in videos that regularly get tens to hundreds of thousands of views.
“I kind of just went down a self-healing rabbit hole,” he said in a phone interview. He started following proponents of biohacking, an approach to health that has become popular with some people, particularly men in technology or tech-adjacent spaces. Biohackers promote a DIY approach to health, with strategies that range from improving sleep quality and meditation to extreme diets (which some criticize as rebranded eating disorders) or even, in one tech billionaire’s case, getting infusions of his teenage son’s blood.
Scott said he cares about limiting his energy consumption. A self-described “conservationist at heart,” he avoids artificial light during the day and only turns on a couple of lamps (lit with incandescent bulbs) at night. And says he’s not opposed to LED bulbs, though that is not always clear in his videos.
“I want to say that I’m very pro-LED,” he said in a phone interview. “I just think the current solution, the current LEDs that are used, are not great. So it’s like LEDs are obviously the future, but we just need to make them more full-spectrum.”
LED holiday lights can provide a vintage vibe with energy-saving benefits
After Instagram creator Mandy Liddle posted her 2024 video about LED lighting, a commenter suggested she check out Tru-Tone, a company making LED holiday lights with a vintage aesthetic. She now partners with the brand, and she gets a small payment when followers buy lights using her code.
“I love the Tru-Tone LEDs,” Liddle said. “They are cozy vibes, but they’re good for the environment. They don’t get hot or anything. A lot of people in my comments are concerned because these, specifically, are a lot more money, but it’s a smaller brand, and it’s really high quality, and I really don’t think I’ll ever go back.”
YouTuber Alec Watson, who runs the popular Technology Connections channel, makes a video about the state of LED string light technology each holiday season. Like other influencers, he doesn’t like the colors or brightness of some of the most common LED string lights. But in addition to Tru-Tone, Watson has recommended Merry Co.’s Vintaglo light set, and he described Sylvania Traditional Glow lights (available through many hardware store chains) as a “pretty good” alternative to the traditional LED string-light look.
Tru-Tone founder David Andora said that when he first set out to make vintage-looking LED lights, he had trouble getting suppliers on board. Traditional LED holiday lights appear very saturated and, as Watson says, “electronic,” because the diodes (the D in LED) can only emit light of a single colored wavelength.
In contrast, incandescent light always appears white. So in the past, colored Christmas lights were created by using colored glass bulbs around a white incandescent light. This is the look that Tru-Tone mimics by using an LED with an extremely warm white bulb wrapped in a colored filter.
“One of the things we’ve learned is that Asian cultures tend to prefer the cooler color temperatures, and those are the places that are producing the world’s light bulbs,” he said in a phone interview. He said suppliers have told him that the bulbs he wants to make are more expensive and difficult to make and less beautiful.
But he said the industry seems to be catching up to Western desires for a warmer look, and more options are coming on the market. This is a good thing, he said, as someone who likes the cozy look but also the benefits of modern LED technology.
He said that one benefit of LED holiday lights is that many strands can be plugged into each other without overloading the electrical circuit and creating the cinematic disaster of old Christmas movies, “where you see a million light strings plugged into a circuit, sparking and blowing fuses and whatnot.”
The vintage aesthetic doesn’t come cheap, at least not up front. A 24-light strand with Tru-Tone’s classic chunky bulb sells for just under $63, and a string of Merry Co.’s Vintaglo mini lights sells for just under $25 (though right now, all of their multi-color strings are out of stock).
But in the LED vs. incandescent debate, up-front cost doesn’t tell the full story. LED lights use 75-90% less energy, which means a cheaper electric bill, and they also last longer. Pearson said she bought a $6 string of mini incandescent lights just for fun a couple of weeks ago, and already five of the lights are burnt out. And Liddle said that she’s experienced having to toss a whole strand of incandescent lights when one bulb burns out.
“You’re just throwing out all this plastic,” she said. “I think quality is worth the price, and I wish more people would think about that instead of being so quick to just buy a cheap box of crappy lights.”
If Pearson could go back to before she hit “publish” on that million-times-viewed video, she said she wouldn’t end it with a joke about how people should use incandescent lights. “I would recommend the Tru-Tone or the Vintaglo lights, if you have the budget for it, and if not, there are similar ones that are, maybe not quite as high quality, but they’re going to fool most people, and they’re going to have more of that pleasant atmosphere to them.”
She, like Liddle, doesn’t actually dream of a return to an incandescent past.
“If we can buy higher-quality stuff that’s safer and gets like, 95% of the way there,” she said, “that is actually what I want.”
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